My friend, there is/was no problem in Montana either, or Idaho for that matter. The problems are human generated, with a very very tiny & loud, wealthy, and very very powerful special interest group controlling the dialogue via their proxy control of, rural small town America, and their death grip on congress!
I live dead center in the northern blue hills of northwest Wisconsin, I am in the field almost every single day, tracking, and imaging gray wolves, I'm one of a tiny handful of men who monitors the blue hills packs, and I can tell you in no uncertain terms that what problems do arrise, emerge from highly irresponsible, and entitlement minded agriculturists, who are all heavilly subsidized by "we the people" to ply their trade! Often, fraud is involved, or another species, such as coyotes!
I know farmers that are the most ethical people one could ever hope to meet, men/women who live as I do, dead center of gray wolf range in northwest Wisconsin, and they have never had even a whiff of trouble from these animals. I also know of a fraudster north of Danbury, a man that was bannered by the media as having had the highest rate of gray wolf depredation in the entire nation(90 plus cattle a year), USA-Today ran articles about his misfortune with the evil, murderous gray wolves eating his poor cattle, problem was it was all lies!
But we never hear about that, no, we hear from the so-called "sport hunting media" how evil, and merciless the nasty gray wolf is, how they just kill for fun, and how a granny out west, blew a charging evil wolf away with her trusty .44(another lie recently published in Outdoor Life). I confronted "Skip Knowles" who is the editor of "Predator Nation" about a spectacular bit of hyperbole that appeared in the publications winter/spring issue, he personally penned it, an account in which he wildly declared that he had spoken with a Yellowstone wildlife biologist who had personally witnessed gray wolves kill and eat three mountain lions, in a single day! Don't believe me, look it up, it was published as an editorial by Mr Knowles, he refused to reply to my challenge to name the biologist, this because there wasn't one, he just made it up, and then published it in the magazine, which his readership then ignorantly soaked up as truth. He ended his editorial by demanding that we pursue our "right" to kill the evil gray wolves! Which they have now done.
As a hunter, its very frustrating to say the least, I for one, am sick of this mindset, you could overcome your ignorance by filling your head with "the real scientific data" on the gray wolf in America, how important it is at stopping disease, disease that crosses over, and back and forth between ungulates, but of course, you actually have to take the time to read the data. I promise you, you will come away from it with a new appreciation for this animal, and a very healthy dose of scepticism for the cattlemans associations standard propaganda lines.
